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Review: Nvidia Titan Xp

by Parm Mann on 26 July 2017, 15:03

Tags: NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qadjni

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Conclusion

...an all-powerful GPU stifled by an inadequate reference cooler that hampers real-world performance.

Nvidia's Titan Xp is a range-topping graphics card that struggles to reach its full potential. What should be an all-singing, all-dancing interpretation of the firm's Pascal architecture is in fact an all-powerful GPU stifled by an inadequate reference cooler that hampers real-world performance.

A £1,149 product deserves better, and while we'll never know what the likes of Asus, MSI and EVGA might have done with a full-fat GP102 die, there is scope for die-hard enthusiasts and system integrators to flex Titan Xp's considerable muscle.

Overclocking potential is ample, and when given room to breathe beneath a third-party cooler, Titan Xp can deliver a level of gameplay that no GTX 1080 Ti can match. For these reasons alone, Nvidia's premium GPU remains an attractive solution for bespoke PCs and die-hard gamers willing to spend big for that last ounce of performance, no matter how small.

Bottom line: GTX 1080 Ti remains the preferred choice for most enthusiasts, but if you insist on Titan Xp, do the right thing and invest in some quality liquid cooling.

The Good
  
The Bad
Full implementation of GP102
Impressive overclocking potential
Well-suited to ultra-high-res gaming
  
Needs better cooling
Costs a small fortune
Limited availability


HEXUS.where2buy

The Nvidia Titan Xp graphics card is available to purchase from GeForce.co.uk. A number of pre-configured Titan Xp systems can be purchased from Scan Computers.

HEXUS.right2reply

At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.


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HEXUS Forums :: 15 Comments

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Posted by LSG501 - Wed 26 Jul 2017 15:40
And as usual Hexus completely ignores anything other than gaming for a gpu….

With the push towards gpu assisted processing and the fact that a large portion of people will likely be using this card (like it's predecessors) to do things like gpu rendering, encoding or other things where the gpu is faster, purely because it's a cheaper alternative to the tesla and quadro cards (which an ‘equal’ card is around 5k), it's about time Hexus actually started reviewing the cards in areas where they often get used such as the ones I mentioned above.
Posted by Troopa - Wed 26 Jul 2017 18:49
junk,
Posted by philehidiot - Wed 26 Jul 2017 19:53
LSG501
And as usual Hexus completely ignores anything other than gaming for a gpu….

With the push towards gpu assisted processing and the fact that a large portion of people will likely be using this card (like it's predecessors) to do things like gpu rendering, encoding or other things where the gpu is faster, purely because it's a cheaper alternative to the tesla and quadro cards (which an ‘equal’ card is around 5k), it's about time Hexus actually started reviewing the cards in areas where they often get used such as the ones I mentioned above.

I think they're playing to their audience. They'll be working on their market research which will show gamers are their primary audience. There are different sites which cater for different markets which will review this card for their respective uses.

I think that they've investigated thermal throttling to the degree they have pretty much shows this thing is useless for most GPGPU, cryptocurrency mining, modelling, etc without significant modifications to the cooling system. This isn't the website for you if you're interested in non gaming applications. Perhaps Anandtech would be more useful for you?
Posted by watercooled - Wed 26 Jul 2017 20:33
LSG501
And as usual Hexus completely ignores anything other than gaming for a gpu….

With the push towards gpu assisted processing and the fact that a large portion of people will likely be using this card (like it's predecessors) to do things like gpu rendering, encoding or other things where the gpu is faster, purely because it's a cheaper alternative to the tesla and quadro cards (which an ‘equal’ card is around 5k), it's about time Hexus actually started reviewing the cards in areas where they often get used such as the ones I mentioned above.
I'm being pedantic, but GPUs aren't really well-suited to video encoding. Sure, they have hardware codecs on-die but their efficacy is inferior to software encoders like x264. The GPU itself i.e. the ‘cores’ aren't really well-suited to encoding either - it's one of those tasks that are just better-suited to big CPUs.
Posted by LSG501 - Wed 26 Jul 2017 21:49
philehidiot
I think they're playing to their audience. They'll be working on their market research which will show gamers are their primary audience. There are different sites which cater for different markets which will review this card for their respective uses.
I'm not asking for it to be just about how good it is with cuda but if you look at the market that this level of nvidia card is used in you'll see a lot of ‘indie studios’ or freelance professionals using it for things like CAD modelling (maya, 3ds max etc) and 3D rendering (vray-rt, octane etc). It is after all fundamentally a cheaper version of the quadro P6000 12GB (lacks ecc ram basically and about 1/5th of the price) and imo it should at least have a couple of tests to show how well it performs in the other areas it might be used in.

If this was the 1030 then obviously I wouldn't be expecting it to be tested in those apps but maybe testing it for things like media playback wouldn't go a miss as it might end up in a htpc for example.

Basically they need to expand the testing to include, at least at a basic level, some of the areas the card might be used in.


watercooled
I'm being pedantic, but GPUs aren't really well-suited to video encoding. Sure, they have hardware codecs on-die but their efficacy is inferior to software encoders like x264. The GPU itself i.e. the ‘cores’ aren't really well-suited to encoding either - it's one of those tasks that are just better-suited to big CPUs.
Maybe encoding wasn't the right term in hindsight but adobe premiere and after effects can utilise the gpu (cuda in nvidia's case) quite heavily for processing the output if the card is supported (a titan will be)

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